Thread: Reasons I feel hones have to be sedimentary

Please correct me if I'm wrong, argue with me, but as we all search for new stones, some people are considering things like Jasper... (?) and I think this is largely wrong/highly labour intensive. After seeign this in two or three threads, and posting in both I thought it might actually be better to post it in it's own thread for discussion, so that before we all go out and find some mineral with Mohs hardness 9.9999 and more common than air, we find out what is important to a hone. Please read:

I"m just tossing my two cents out there for the world. Thinking about the mineralogy and material properties, shouldn't all hones necessarily be sedimentary rock? My thinking is this:
Hard particles in a soft substrate is like sandpaper that refreshes itself. If you have one hard thing it is like a chisel or a knife or a grater. Think about this on an extreme level. If I have a stone with a profile like this /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ and it is a single hard stone that is harder than steel, it's gonna cut gouges in the steel equal to that, and never really smooth out. Think cheese grater. If those cutting peices are glued together with something softer, they will break off and smooth out. Where this "glue" is soft, like coticule, it will continuously refresh itself, and cut a lot faster with a slurry. When this "glue" is hard, the cutting particles will eventually smooth out a little, like a J-nat. When this glue is solid, or if the crystalline structure is solid, the grit has to be built in. All sandpaper is alumina or SiC or whatever, just different size pieces. Or DMT. The diamonds are the hardest thing known to man, and the way they get different grits is not by changing the hardness or mineral properties of the diamond, but the GRIT of the diamond they embed. So while Jasper (or quartz or tigers eye or cats eye or corundum or diamond or sapphire or ruby or hawks eye or feldspar or topaz or chrysoberyl or chromium or boron or beryl... you get the idea) is harder than steel, that is not important. Its the finish you put on it that will be important. Lapping with a DMT XX will give you a rough hone, lapping with a DMT C a smoother hone, DMT F a smoother hone yet, etc etc. And the grit will not correspond, ie, lapping with the DMT C (325 grit) doesn't mean your jasper hone will be a 325 grit hone, just rougher than if it were lapped with the DMT F (1200). My best guess for this success is if by trial and error through different lapping treatments you came up with a progression, or if you only made one rock, you made is smoother than glass (very literally) to be used as a very final polisher, probably around some astronomical grit, as it wouldn't do any honing, only polishing.

The evidence I'm guessing behind all this is:
-All man made rocks are sedimentary- SiC or alumina or something harder than steel, BOUND BY something softer than steel, polymer, clay, ceramic, etc.
-The exception to this is carbo stones, because carborundum is harder than steel, and we all know what a bitch it is to lap a swaty or a carbo. If you look closely at them though, they are not a single crystal, and I suspect they are sedimentary in nature, where the sediment is SiC powder (SiC is commonly known as carborundum)
-Grit and Hardness have no correlation- all DMTs are diamond, SiC sandpaper comes in all grits
-If something is harder than steel (roughly 7 or higher on the Mohs scale) steel will do little to wear it down, and it will EAT steel (try taking a coping saw to a DMT)
-If something is softer than steel (roughly 6 or lower on the Mohs) it will barely touch steel and steel will just wear it down. (try cutting steel wire with a knife shaped piece of shale)
-All confirmed location hones to date are sedimentary- Thuringens, Coticule, BBW, J-nat, the British Isle shales, Arkansas, Turkeys, etc.
-While Sham's hone MIGHT be jasper because it LOOKS like Jasper, until it is evaluated by a minerologist I'm skeptical. To me it looks like a sedimentary rock, just not with clear striations. If you want I can post pictures of limestone or a piece of shale I use as a paper weight, neither show striations, both are sedimentary. Olivia, please can you ask your brother about this?
-Diamond paste is all ground up diamond, just in different sizes, and the size determines grit
-IIRC Shapton Glass Stones are only mounted on glass, they are actually polymer bound (sedimentary again), why wouldn't they just make a hone out of Silica Glass (SiO2, same as quartz)?